Type of site | Internet encyclopedia |
---|---|
Owner | Wikimedia Foundation |
URL | en |
Commercial | No |
Registration | Optional; required for certain tasks |
Users | 47,328,949 users and 861 administrators (as of 30 April 2024) |
Launched | 15 January 2001 |
Content license | Creative Commons Attribution/ Share-Alike 4.0 (most text also dual-licensed under GFDL) Media licensing varies |
The English Wikipedia is the primary [lower-alpha 1] English-language edition of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. It was created by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on 15 January 2001, as Wikipedia's first edition.
English Wikipedia is hosted alongside other language editions by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American nonprofit organization. Its content is written independently of other editions [1] in various varieties of English, aiming to stay consistent within articles. Its internal newspaper is The Signpost .
English Wikipedia is the most-read version of Wikipedia, [2] [3] accounting for 48% of Wikipedia's cumulative traffic, with the remaining percentage split among the other languages. [4] The English Wikipedia has the most articles of any edition, at 6,818,672 as of April2024. [5] It contains 10.8% of articles in all Wikipedias, [5] although it lacks millions of articles found in other editions. [1] The edition's one-billionth edit was made on 13 January 2021. [6]
English Wikipedia, often as a stand-in for Wikipedia overall, has been praised for its enablement of the democratization of knowledge, extent of coverage, unique structure, culture, and reduced degree of commercial bias. It has been criticized for exhibiting systemic bias, particularly gender bias against women and ideological bias. [7] [8] While its reliability was frequently criticized in the 2000s, it has improved over time, receiving greater praise in the late 2010s and early 2020s, [9] [7] [10] [lower-alpha 2] having become an important fact-checking site. [11] [12] English Wikipedia has been characterized as having less cultural bias than other language editions due to its broader editor base. [2]
Editors of the English Wikipedia have pioneered some ideas as conventions, policies or features which were later adopted by Wikipedia editions in some of the other languages. These ideas include "featured articles", [13] the neutral-point-of-view policy, [14] navigation templates, [15] the sorting of short "stub" articles into sub-categories, [16] dispute resolution mechanisms such as mediation and arbitration, [17] and weekly collaborations. [18]
It surpassed six million articles on 23 January 2020. [19] In November 2022, the total volume of the compressed texts of its articles amounted to 20 gigabytes. [20]
The edition's one-billionth edit was made on 13 January 2021 by Ser Amantio di Nicolao (Steven Pruitt) who as of that date is the user with the highest number of edits on the English Wikipedia, at over four million. [6] Currently, there are 6,818,672 articles created with 916,581 files. The encyclopedia is home to 10.8% of articles in all Wikipedias (down from more than 50% in 2003). [21] [22] The English Wikipedia currently has 47,328,949 registered accounts of which 861 are administrators.
The English Wikipedia reached 4,000,000 registered user accounts on 1 April 2007, [23] over a year since the millionth Wikipedian registered an account in February 2006. [24]
Over 1,100,000 editors have edited Wikipedia more than 10 times. [25] Over 30,000 editors perform more than 5 edits per month, and over 3,000 perform more than 100 edits per month. [26]
On 1 March 2014, The Economist , in an article titled "The Future of Wikipedia", cited a trend analysis concerning data published by the Wikimedia Foundation stating that "[t]he number of editors for the English-language version has fallen by a third in seven years." [27] The attrition rate for active editors in English Wikipedia was cited by The Economist as substantially in contrast to statistics for Wikipedia in other languages (non-English Wikipedia). The Economist reported that the number of contributors with an average of five or more edits per month was relatively constant since 2008 for Wikipedia in other languages at approximately 42,000 editors within narrow seasonal variances of about 2,000 editors up or down. The number of active editors in English Wikipedia, by "sharp" comparison, was cited as peaking in 2007 at approximately 50,000 and dropping to 30,000 by the start of 2014.
The trend analysis published in The Economist presents Wikipedia in other languages (non-English Wikipedia) as successful in retaining their active editors on a renewable and sustained basis, with their numbers remaining relatively constant at approximately 42,000. [27]
The English Wikipedia has the Arbitration Committee (also known as ArbCom) that consists of a panel of editors that imposes binding rulings with regard to disputes between other editors of the online encyclopedia. [28] It was created by Jimmy Wales on 4 December 2003 as an extension of the decision-making power he had formerly held as owner of the site. [29] [30] When it was founded, the committee consisted of 12 arbitrators divided into three groups of four members each. [29] [31]
In 2022, for English Wikipedia, Americans accounted for about 40% of active editors, followed by British and Indian editors accounting for about 10% of each, and Canadian and Australian at about 5%. [32]
This article's "criticism" or "controversy" section may compromise the article's neutrality .(July 2023) |
One controversy in the English Wikipedia concerns which national variety of the English language is to be preferred, two candidates being American English and British English. [33] Suggestions range from standardizing upon a single form of English to forking the English Wikipedia project.[ citation needed ] A style guideline states, "the English Wikipedia has no general preference for a major national variety of the language" and "an article on a topic that has strong ties to a particular English-speaking nation uses the appropriate variety of English for that nation". [34]
A 2013 study from Oxford University concluded that the most disputed articles on the English Wikipedia tended to be broader issues, while on other language Wikipedias the most disputed articles tended to be regional issues; this is due to the English language's status as a global lingua franca , which means that some who edit the English Wikipedia have English as their second language. The study stated that the most disputed entries on the English Wikipedia were: George W. Bush, anarchism, Muhammad, list of WWE personnel, global warming, circumcision, United States, Jesus, race and intelligence, and Christianity. [35]
Incidents of threats of violence against high schools on Wikipedia have been reported in the press. [36] [37] [38] The Glen A. Wilson High School was the subject of such a threat in 2008, [36] [37] [38] and a 14-year-old was arrested for making a threat against Niles West High School on Wikipedia in 2006. [39]
A "WikiProject" is a group of contributors who want to work together as a team to improve Wikipedia. These groups may focus on a specific topic area (for example, women's history), a specific location or a specific kind of task (for example, checking newly created pages). As of August 2022, the English Wikipedia had over 2,000 WikiProjects, for which activity varied. [40]
In 2007, in preparation for producing a print version, the English Wikipedia introduced an assessment scale of the quality of articles. [41] Articles are rated by WikiProjects. The range of quality classes begins with "Stub" (very short pages), followed by "Start", "C" and "B" (in increasing order of quality). Community peer review is needed for the article to enter one of the quality classes: either "good article", "A" or the highest, "featured article". Of the about 6.5 million articles and lists assessed as of April 2022, more than 6,000 (0.09%) are featured articles, and fewer than 4,000 (0.06%) are featured lists. One featured article per day, as selected by editors, appears on the main page of Wikipedia. [42] [43]
The Wikipedia Version 1.0 Editorial Team has developed a table (shown below) that displays data of all rated articles by quality and importance, on the English Wikipedia. If an article or list receives different ratings by two or more WikiProjects, then the highest rating is used in the table, pie-charts, and bar-chart. The software auto-updates the data.
Researcher Giacomo Poderi found that articles tend to reach featured status via the intensive work of a few editors. [44] A 2010 study found unevenness in quality among featured articles and concluded that the community process is ineffective in assessing the quality of articles. [45]
All rated articles by quality and importance | ||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Quality | Importance | |||||
Top | High | Mid | Low | ??? | Total | |
FA | 1,556 | 2,448 | 2,375 | 1,892 | 180 | 8,451 |
FL | 179 | 665 | 761 | 695 | 109 | 2,409 |
A | 355 | 681 | 784 | 579 | 83 | 2,482 |
GA | 3,165 | 7,189 | 14,516 | 18,999 | 1,731 | 45,600 |
B | 16,567 | 32,155 | 53,079 | 65,516 | 20,386 | 187,703 |
C | 16,549 | 53,077 | 132,280 | 296,350 | 84,262 | 582,518 |
Start | 18,477 | 91,835 | 411,612 | 1,575,048 | 396,109 | 2,493,081 |
Stub | 4,226 | 31,617 | 278,174 | 2,772,814 | 760,568 | 3,847,399 |
List | 4,756 | 16,858 | 53,036 | 187,840 | 66,710 | 329,200 |
Assessed | 65,830 | 236,525 | 946,617 | 4,919,733 | 1,330,138 | 7,498,843 |
Unassessed | 119 | 483 | 1,252 | 19,252 | 425,147 | 446,253 |
Total | 65,949 | 237,008 | 947,869 | 4,938,985 | 1,755,285 | 7,945,096 |
Community-produced news publications include The Signpost. [46] The Signpost (previously known as The Wikipedia Signpost) [47] is the English Wikipedia's newspaper. [46] [48] [49] It is managed by the Wikipedia community and is published online weekly. [46] [50] Each edition contains stories and articles related to the Wikipedia community. [51] [52]
The publication was founded in January 2005 by Wikipedia administrator and later Chair of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees, Michael Snow. [46] [47] [53] Originally titled The Wikipedia Signpost, it was later shortened to The Signpost. [47] [54] The newspaper reports on Wikipedia events including Arbitration Committee rulings, [55] Wikimedia Foundation issues, [56] and other Wikipedia-related projects. [57] Snow continued to contribute as a writer to The Signpost until his appointment to the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation in February 2008. [58]
Investigative journalism by The Signpost in 2015 on changes to freedom of panorama copyright restrictions in Europe was covered by publications in multiple languages including German, [59] Italian, [60] Polish, [61] and Russian. [62] Wikipedia users Gamaliel and Go Phightins! became editors-in-chief of The Signpost in January 2015; prior editor-in-chief The ed17 noted that during his tenure the publication expanded its scope by including more reporting on the wider Wikimedia movement and English Wikipedia itself. [63] In a letter to readers upon the newspaper's tenth anniversary, the co-editors-in-chief stressed the importance of maintaining independence from the Wikimedia Foundation in their reporting. [64]
The Signpost has been the subject of academic analysis in publications including Sociological Forum , [65] the social movements journal Interface, [66] and New Review of Academic Librarianship; [67] and was consulted for data on Wikipedia by researchers from Los Alamos National Laboratory and Dartmouth College. [68] It has garnered "positive" reception from some media publications including The New York Times , [69] The Register , [70] Nonprofit Quarterly, [71] and Heise Online . [72] John Broughton's 2008 book Wikipedia: The Missing Manual called The Signpost "essential reading for ambitious new Wikipedia editors". [73]
Other community news publications include the "WikiWorld" web comic, the Wikipedia Weekly podcast, and newsletters of specific WikiProjects like The Bugle from WikiProject Military History and the monthly newsletter from The Guild of Copy Editors. There are a number of publications from the Wikimedia Foundation and multilingual publications such as the Wikimedia Blog and This Month in Education .
Wikipedia, a free-content online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers known as Wikipedians, began with its first edit on 15 January 2001, two days after the domain was registered. It grew out of Nupedia, a more structured free encyclopedia, as a way to allow easier and faster drafting of articles and translations.
Wikinews is a free-content news wiki and a project of the Wikimedia Foundation that works through collaborative journalism. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has distinguished Wikinews from Wikipedia by saying, "On Wikinews, each story is to be written as a news story as opposed to an encyclopedia article." Wikinews's neutral point of view policy aims to distinguish it from other citizen journalism efforts such as Indymedia and OhmyNews. In contrast to most Wikimedia Foundation projects, Wikinews allows original work in the form of original reporting and interviews. In contrast to newspapers, Wikinews does not permit op-ed.
The German Wikipedia is the German-language edition of Wikipedia, a free and publicly editable online encyclopedia.
The Esperanto Wikipedia is the Esperanto version of Wikipedia, which was started on 11 May 2001, alongside the Basque Wikipedia. With over 353,000 articles as of April 2024, it is the 37th-largest Wikipedia as measured by the number of articles, and the largest Wikipedia in a constructed language.
The Finnish Wikipedia is the edition of Wikipedia in the Finnish language. By article count, it is the 27th largest Wikipedia with about 572,000 articles as of April 2024. Wikipedia is the only encyclopedia in Finnish which is still updated.
Wikipedia is a free content online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the use of the wiki-based editing system MediaWiki. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read reference work in history. It is consistently ranked as one of the ten most popular websites in the world, and as of 2024 is ranked the fifth most visited website on the Internet by Semrush, and second by Ahrefs. Founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on January 15, 2001, Wikipedia is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American nonprofit organization that employs a staff of over 700 people.
Wikivoyage is a free web-based travel guide for travel destinations and travel topics written by volunteer authors. It is a sister project of Wikipedia and supported and hosted by the same non-profit Wikimedia Foundation (WMF). Wikivoyage has been called the "Wikipedia of travel guides".
The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., abbreviated WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, and registered there as a charitable foundation. It is the host of Wikipedia, the seventh most visited website in the world. In addition, the foundation hosts 14 other related content projects. It supports the development of MediaWiki, the wiki software that underpins them all.
The Japanese Wikipedia is the Japanese-language edition of Wikipedia, a free, open-source online encyclopedia. Started on 11 May 2001, the edition attained the 200,000 article mark in April 2006 and the 500,000 article mark in June 2008. As of April 2024, it has over 1,413,000 articles with 13,320 active contributors, ranking fourth behind the English, French and German editions.
On Wikimedia Foundation projects, an Arbitration Committee (ArbCom) is a binding dispute resolution panel of editors. Each of Wikimedia's projects are editorially autonomous and independent, and some of them have established their own ArbComs who work according to rules developed by the project's editors and are usually annually elected by their communities. ArbComs generally address misconduct by administrators and editors with access to advanced tools, and a range of "real-world" issues related to harmful conduct that can arise in the context of Wikimedia projects. Rulings, policies and procedures differ between projects depending on local and cultural contexts. According to the Wikimedia Terms of Use, users are not obliged to have a dispute solved by an ArbCom.
The Scots Wikipedia is the Scots-language edition of the free online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. It was established on 23 June 2005, and it first reached 1,000 articles in February 2006, and 5,000 articles in November 2010. As of April 2024, it has about 35,000 articles. The Scots Wikipedia is one of the ten Wikipedias written in an Anglic language or English-based pidgin or creole, the others being the English Wikipedia, the Simple English Wikipedia, the Old English Wikipedia, the Pitkern-Norfuk Wikipedia, the Tok Pisin Wikipedia, the Jamaican Patois Wikipedia, the Sranan Tongo Wikipedia, the Nigerian Pidgin Wikipedia, and the Ghanaian Pidgin Wikipedia.
The Wikipedia community, collectively and individually known as Wikipedians, is an online community of volunteers who create and maintain Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. Since August 2012, the word "Wikipedian" has been an Oxford Dictionary entry.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and a topical guide to Wikipedia:
Conflict-of-interest (COI) editing on Wikipedia occurs when editors use Wikipedia to advance the interests of their external roles or relationships. The type of COI editing of most concern on Wikipedia is paid editing for public relations (PR) purposes. Several Wikipedia policies and guidelines exist to combat conflict of interest editing, including Wikipedia:Conflict of interest and Wikipedia:Paid-contribution disclosure.
A WikiProject, or Wikiproject, is an affinity group for contributors with shared goals within the Wikimedia movement. WikiProjects are prevalent within the largest wiki, Wikipedia, and exist to varying degrees within sibling projects such as Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikidata, and Wikisource. They also exist in different languages, and translation of articles is a form of their collaboration.
The Signpost is the Wikimedia movement's online newspaper. Managed by the volunteer community, it is published online with contributions from Wikimedia editors. The newspaper's scope includes the Wikimedia community and events related to Wikipedia, including Arbitration Committee rulings, Wikimedia Foundation issues, and other Wikipedia-related projects. It was founded in January 2005 by Wikipedian Michael Snow, who continued as a contributor until his February 2008 appointment to the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees.
Various publications and commentators have predicted the end of Wikipedia since it rose to prominence. Multiple potential dangers have been proposed, such as poor quality control and inconsistent editors/administrators.
Wiki Loves Pride is a campaign to improve LGBT-related content on Wikipedia and other projects in the Wikimedia movement.
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, with all Wikipedias as total {{NUMBEROF|ARTICLES|total}}
= 62,906,103.